Expense Account, Mint Because much of policymaking in India is about lobbying power, we see some strange outcomes. Take the draft bancassurance guidelines, for example, that lay down the rules of bank tie-ups for insurance companies. The weird spectrum-like allocation of banks to insurance companies is a classic example of a compromise that benefits no...
Expense Account, Mint If you hear of a company selling a stake in itself, and then giving money to the buyer to buy that stake, what would you think? There’s something wrong with the deal. That’s the story in the bancassurance market right now and the rush of life insurance companies to tie up with...
Expense Account, Mint The Rs2.9 trillion Indian life insurance industry has, for the first time since privatization in 2000, seen contraction over two consecutive financial years. Fiscal 2010-11 saw a shrinking of 20% and the full year 2011-12, estimates the insurance regulator, will contract 15%. This means that enough of us did not buy an...
Expense Account, Mint After the “How am I doing financially?” question, the second most often asked money question is about medical insurance. Which company to buy from, how much, floater or individual, rider or not, do I need it if my office and that of my spouse gives medical cover and so on—the breadth of...
If you, the customer, are a day late in a credit card bill payment or a phone or electricity bill, you’re fined. Don’t pay for some time and you begin to get legal notices. The electric supply company will simply cut supply. The phone company will cut the connection. A small error in home loan...
Expense Account, Mint Armed with basic knowledge of an Excel sheet and some dribbles of wisdom after a basic capital markets course, when I opened a unit-linked insurance plan (Ulip) brochure five years ago and tried to do the math, I fell off my chair. The sheet showed me a product that was so inherently...
Expense Account, Mint While we were used to the mutual fund industry complaining about its regulator, soft voices against the regulator are surfacing in the life insurance industry as well—and they sound very surprised. The funds were used to a tough regulator, but the insurance industry is a bit open-mouthed by the sudden turnaround in...
Expense Account, Mint I cannot forget the conversation with the chief of a newly born asset management company. The year was 2008. The world as the West knew it was collapsing. And this CEO’s US-based parent company, bang in the middle of imploding all across the world, was on life support paid for by the...
Expense account, Mint here is a famous saying: you count hours and days, while the years just fly by. This looks certainly true of changes in the road rules around banking, insurance and mutual fund products in the year gone by in the world’s second fastest growing economy. It takes a sweeping look at the...
Expense Account, Mint Why has cost become so central to the insurance product? Nobody talked about costs for decades when we all bought endowment and money-back plans. Those of us who are old enough to have these in our portfolio remember how they were sold—the promise was of a certain sum that would come back,...